MARK STEELE
College Walk
Peeping at Tom’s
K
Kenny Kramer has milked a living
out of being the real-life inspiration
for the Seinfeld character Cosmo
Kramer and he’s not afraid to admit
it. His tours of the show’s famous
New York City locales have sold
out every Saturday since 1996.
His last tour of the year was
Labor Day weekend. After that it
was off to Mexico and all places
south, the beginning of his annual
seven-month vacation. “It’s been
quite lucrative,” says Kramer, a former stand-up comic. “It’s prevented me from having a real job.”
The 60 seats on the tour bus, at
$37.50 a pop, sell out weeks in
advance.The tour, however, would
be nothing without Tom’s Restaurant, the real-life diner whose
storefront and conveniently gen-
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eric, red neon “restaurant” sign
became the show’s most visible
New York icon.“It’s like Mecca for
Seinfeld fans,” Kramer says.
Not that the tour group goes
inside for a meal. A picture with
the real Kramer outside of the real
diner — whose exterior served as
a front for the set of Monk’s Café
— suffices.
Some other pilgrims, however,
like Maria Casalbuono and Betty
Giordano, sisters from Melbourne,
flock to the corner of 112th Street
and Broadway to breach that barrier between fact and fiction. They
open the door and go inside.
On a late summer afternoon, the
two sisters lunched at Tom’s before
heading across the Hudson River
to Hoboken, where, as members of
the Frank Sinatra Society of Australia, they would pay homage to
the birthplace of Old Blue Eyes.
They were seated in the back of
the restaurant, near the bathrooms.
They ordered salads. The service
was quick, if not curt. Like most
fans, they experienced Tom’s with
a “What Would Jerry Do?” attitude, though in their case, it was
Elaine they channeled.
“Elaine would have complained
the whole time!” they said in
singsong unison.
Another reason to complain was
the size of the place. “It seemed
small,” Casalbuono said. “It looked
much bigger on TV.” The ensuing
conversation with the two matronly women was a bit awkward, as any
parent who has felt compelled to
puncture the myth of, say, the tooth
fairy, knows:The restaurant’s interior was never used on the show.
“You just get sucked into it,”
Casalbuono said rather sheepishly.
Usually, the staff is left to console
the bereaved fan who discovers he
has walked not onto the set of a
TV show but into a real diner.
“They always want to know what
booth Jerry sat in,” said Tom Nola,
a waiter at the restaurant for the
past six years. “Haven’t people
heard of Hollywood?”
Its fame, courtesy of a release
form they signed in 1989 when a
cameraman and a producer asked to
shoot the restaurant’s exterior, has
been a mixed blessing. Much like
the scion trying to make a name for
himself, the restaurant’s owners feel
a little bruised by the shadow that
looms over them.
“It wasn’t like we were left for
dead and Seinfeld came and saved
us,” said one of the owners, Michael
Zoulis. “We’ve been a mainstay in
this neighborhood for 60 years.”
Ipso facto, Zoulis points down the
counter to the lunchtime regulars,
mostly men who work in the trades
and a smattering of students and
neighborhood folk.
Tom’s Restaurant has been a
Zoulis family enterprise for two
generations, since the patriarchs
immigrated to New York from the
Greek island of Kasos more than
half a century ago. Most employees
Return of the Native
S
She possesses neither brilliant
plumage nor an elite address. Powerful tenants do not call for her
eviction. Celebrities do not rally to
her cause (she has no cause). She is
no stylish killer, no media darling,
no deadly sex symbol. And unlike
Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk of
opulent Fifth Avenue, she does not
even have a name.
But to those who have seen her
poking around in the grass and dandelions in Morningside Park, forag-
are family members whose tenure
at Tom’s reaches back decades.
Zoulis won’t say what role Seinfeld
has played in the success of the
restaurant, but clearly it figures in
the ledger. On the restaurant’s Web
site, the link is featured prominently — along with the connection to
Suzanne Vega’s hit song “Tom’s
Diner.” The restaurant sells souvenir T-shirts and mugs for $13.00,
both portraying the classic exterior
shot seen on the show. Signed photos of the cast and Al Hirschfeld
drawings of each character hang on
the walls.
The family members who work
at Tom’s enjoy a lifestyle not unlike
Kenny Kramer’s. In a typical
arrangement, Michael Teromonahos, 56, a cousin who has been
working at Tom’s since 1971, is substituting as short-order cook for his
son, who has been in Greece for the
last three months. “It’s the so-called
Greek way,” Zoulis said with a
shrug. “You come here to the U.S.
to make money and then go back.”
In the seven years since the show
ended, after the syndication of Seinfeld in 90 countries and amid the
incremental release of all 180
episodes on DVD, the distinction
between the real and fictional Tom’s
Restaurant has become arbitrary,
with each camp feeding into the
marketing of the other. The members of the extended Zoulis family
are unfazed by the daily stream of
tourists snapping pictures outside
the restaurant or making oddball
requests, like when a fan recently
asked for a souvenir menu.
At the register, Bill Teromonahos, another cousin, who has been
working at Tom’s for 30 years, gave
the order the same interest he
would a tuna sandwich.
“One menu,” he said. “To go?”
— Jeremy Smerd ’03JRN
ing for wild cherries, raspberries,
and acorns, she has inspired much
wonder and curiosity. In her rustbrown iridescence, her gamebird
ponderousness, she recalls a precolonial Manhattan rife with black
bears, mountain lions, white-tailed
deer. She is unexpected, anomalous,
yet somehow at home, not so much
an alien transplant as a pioneer of
resettlement on an island where
there once flourished, in great numbers, her species, Meleagris gallopavo
— the wild turkey.
Brad Taylor, president of Friends
of Morningside Park, an all-volunteer park advocacy group founded
by Columbia undergrads in 1981,
says that this specific turkey was first
discovered in May, though no one
knows her exact origins (turkeyrich Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx
is a good possibility). “She hangs
out on the upper level of the park,
between 114th and 116th,” he says.
“There’s a spring there, which
is probably where she gets her
water.” Parks Department gardener
Marechal Brown, who works in
Morningside, notes that the 30-acre
park is home to a wide variety of
birds, including red-bellied woodpeckers, cardinals, goldfinches, a pair
of Canada geese, and, down by the
pond, a double-crested cormorant,
which arrived last year.
But it is the turkey that has been
drawing the most attention. “I called
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the Audubon Society when I first
saw her,” says Brown, who judges
the bird to be on the small side
(adult turkey hens generally weigh
between 8 and 12 pounds).“She was
very tame, and I was worried about
her. But they told me that it was better not to move her, since it might
traumatize her, and that she’d probably come back to the park anyway
because that’s where she wanted to
be.” Photographs of the new immigrant have appeared on several blogs,
such as Curbed.com, along with
comments that reflect the essential
awe that springs from a chance
encounter with wildlife.
“Only when you see birds up
close do you understand the mystery of animals in general and birds
in particular,” says Yigal Gelb
’04SIPA, program director for the
Audubon Society of New York
City. “There’s a magic to it.”
Tilting at Cervantes
T
There’s no cause for despair like
one’s own dubious success.
Recently, running a hand through
my thinning bank account, I floated
the currents of Amazon.com to buy
some used Lit Hum texts on the
cheap for my daughter, ’09CC.
Stalking the Penguin Don Quixote
($12.96 new), I noticed that Amazon publishes a sales rank for the
book.This was “an added service for
customers,” a note explained. “The
lower the number, the higher the
sales for that particular item.The calculation . . . is updated each hour to
reflect recent and historical sales of
every item sold on Amazon.com.”
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Indeed, the mere existence of a
New York turkey is something of a
magical event, given the bird’s
checkered history in the region,
from which it had once been
entirely extinct.
In 1609, when Henry Hudson
sailed past Manhatta (“land of many
hills”), as it was called by the LenniLenape people who lived there,
wild turkeys abounded throughout
what is now New York State south
of the Adirondacks. But colonization brought the clearing of forests
for farmland, as well as year-round
hunting, and by the 1840s, the bird
had vanished from New York.
Toward the end of the 19th century,
however, farming began to decline
and some of the disused farmland
was gradually reclaimed by brush
and trees. Around 1948, lured by the
habitat, a few turkeys from northern
Pennsylvania wandered across state
lines and into southwestern New
York, and before long, healthy
breeding populations were established.Today, due to migration and
government-sponsored restoration
projects, there are some 250,000
wild turkeys in New York State,
according to the National Wild
Turkey Federation.
But the survival of a smallish lone
turkey in the cliffs of Morningside
Park is no simple matter, and it’s not
just the threat of cars whizzing past
on the surrounding streets, or of
unleashed dogs, or of some cruel
human with a stone: For high up on
the eastern bluff of Morningside
Heights, atop the apse of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, overlooking the descending tiers of
the park, there lurks, in his nest, a
red-tailed hawk, watching for his
next meal.
— Paul Hond
Quixote’s sales rank: 80,490.
Apparently 80,489 other books
were selling better than one of the
supreme diversions ever devised by
or for the human imagination.What
could they possibly be? The obvious
smorgasbord of diet-fad cookbooks,
of course, along with TV and movie
tie-ins, as-yet-unindicted-celebrity
memoirs, undigested reportage of
current events, a few scraps of cheerful pornography, and the occasional
inspired mix (J.Lo’s Joy of Great LowCarb Sex in Gaza). But these and
other literary lampreys that infest
the best-selling deeps surely couldn’t
account for more than, say, 10,000
titles. And the other 70,000?
A thought swam up from the
lagoon of vanity.
An hour or so of research
revealed that a breezy, little how-to
book, dashed off in 1987 by a free-
lance hack from the College class of
’77 (OK, it’s me), is outselling the
big guns of the College’s Core Curriculum. This clearly suggested
something profound, but all I really
felt was a little fist-pump of gloat
followed by profound dismay.
Let’s start with a partial, suggestive
scorecard. My book, On Writing the
College Application Essay, based partly
on my work in Columbia’s admissions office, costs $11.16 on Amazon. In the late afternoon of August
17, 2005, it had a sales rank of 1,723.
Here’s how a few Core luminaries, many carved in stone on the
frieze of Butler Library, stacked up:
Homer’s The Iliad (Lattimore translation, $10.50) came in at 124,008.
The Odyssey ($9.75) at 139,596.
Dante’s Inferno (Mandelbaum translation, $6.50) at 31,050. Woolf ’s To
the Lighthouse ($9.60) at 6,007.
PENNY CARTER
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Austen’s Pride and Prejudice ($6.95)
at 157,803. Shakespeare’s King Lear
($3.95) at 100,142.
There’s more, but let’s cut to the
capper:The Bible, Revised Standard
Version ($9.56), came in with a sales
rank of 33,163.
I understand why things might
be a bit slow for an 1,100-page
volume urging a cheerless avoid-
ance of hell, available gratis in the
drawer of any Motel 6. But how to
account for the sluggish numbers
of the Inferno, that most delicious
trip to hell ever written, at less than
the price of a frozen pizza?
I know, I know, that’s all fiction
and drama and poetry. Comparing
my insignificant squib with them is
apples and pomegranates. But I’m
only too happy to lace up the gloves
against the CC boys. The battle
against any edition of Thomas
Hobbes, for example, would be
nasty, brutish, and short (a minute
ago, the Cambridge edition, at
$13.00, weighed in at 305,659; the
Hackett, at $10.95, is 146,905).
Adam Smith, the fat cat (The Wealth
of Nations, Modern Library, at
$16.47, was 39,800), would have his
ears boxed at his own game, not
only by me but also by an older
nemesis: The Marx-Engels Reader,
almost double the price of the
Smith ($28.05), at least took me
into the late rounds at 8,371.
Only one book on the Core syllabi could compete, perhaps owing
to the recent blip of interest in
things Catholic: the Confessions of
St. Augustine ($7.15) at 1,566.
Maybe people think it’s a Florida
celebrity tell-all.
Though I’m embarrassed to be
part of the postmodern trump of
Cervantes, Herodotus is another
matter. The old gossip wouldn’t
meet the most elementary journalistic standards today, not to mention
qualifications for a history department job at a community college:
When he isn’t retailing hearsay he’s
making it up — and he still can’t
turn the 100,000 corner (278,434).
So here’s my proposal: If the University will put me in stone up there
on Butler Library with all the rest of
the mediocre sellers — my name is
close enough to Herodotus to make
the stonework a piece of cake — I’ll
cut them in on a fat percentage of
the royalties on my next title,
which, judging from my track
record, could exceed the price of
two tickets to the Macy’s Parade.
Every true story, John Updike
says, has an anticlimax. This week,
just before finishing these reflections, I checked my sales rank and
found it had fallen to 19,172.
I don’t even want to look at
Hamlet’s.
— Harry Bauld ’77CC
Coded Love Poem
O
O I love Sadie whether laved or furry
As you move rock whether ball or bit.
I won’t be a pig, you won’t be sorry;
You won’t be a prig, and I won’t worry.
O I love ships and jelly, ties and brass,
As heat though white is red in thought.
Hide with me beneath the house, my lass.
We’ll pass notes in the last row of the class.
O I love mitts whether curved or not.
I run outdoors, mad to be in contact with it.
With what? Even in winter you’d be hot.
We have one gun only.Who will be shot?
If it’s night we will buck until freak of day,
If it’s day we will rock until fast of night,
And all night long and all through the day,
We’ll make love run (make out, make hay).
— David Lehman ’70CC, ’78GSAS
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